Too busy - or focusing on the wrong things? Here is some help and tips
I don’t think in over 30 years I’ve ever got to the end of my To Do list, nor felt I have enough hours in the day. Making sure I use my time wisely is essential and here’s the best way I’ve found. It comes (for those who like the background) from Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
The key concept is moving from dependence to independence, which involves
- Being proactive and shaping what you spend your time doing
- Focus on the end goal - what you are trying to achieve and ensuring others know that too
- Managing your time effectively. How, I hear you ask – I’m too busy?
This model looks at the difference between what’s important and what’s urgent.
- Important tasks are those that get you towards your end goals, what you should be doing
- Urgent tasks are those things we tend to use up our time doing
The Crises (important and urgent) should, and usually does, get focus.
The Trivial is usually the easiest to stop.
The hard bit is moving our focus from interruptions to prevention. Try tracking the tasks you do for a week and putting them into the relevant quadrant to see where you spend your time. More time for prevention by doing less on interruptions is easy to say, but hard to do. It needs great self-awareness and conscious decision making on how we spend our time. Here are the key actions for each quadrant:
A great example for me was realising I was sinking with too much work in the early days of a large programme I was running. I took a conscious decision to let some of the interruptions go (very hard for me) and focus on recruiting the team, a top right activity. Writing blogs for me is another top right task. It’s my way of stepping back, reflecting and thinking, I work best when I set my self the time to write things down in this way.
Lastly, if you are using planner in Microsoft Teams maybe try using the labels feature to tick if a task is important, urgent or both. Then you can filter on the important ones and focus on the right things. If you are still only using teams at its basic level for meetings and messages would learning how to use Teams to its full capability be important?
Want to know more?
If you have access, try these short LinkedIn Learning Courses
- Four Time Management Tips (11 minutes) – basics of time management
- Getting Things Done (30 minutes) – methodology to capture, clarify, organise, reflect and engage with tasks.
Workplace Inclusion and Employee Wellbeing | Menopause Licensed Trainer with Henpicked | Leadership and Team Development | Finalist in the Bolton Women in Business Award 2025 | Founder of BelongHR
4 年Love this Mark Jacot - there’s some great tips and techniques here that we could all do with taking notice of and refocusing our energy into doing. I’m certainly going to make some changes on the back of this and view the LinkedIn Learning recommendations. Thanks for sharing ??
Chartered MCIPD - Business Owner/HR Consultant at People Team Solutions
4 年Thanks Mark Jacot this is most timely for me and I will attempt to apply some of these techniques over the coming weeks. Balancing a business with young kids, caring responsibilities and a home in the middle of a pandemic has certainly offered some challenges!! Most grateful for your insight! Hope you and your family are well!